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health care appointments

snow

Hi all I am a Children's Health care professional and a student specialising in working with children with severe disability, learning disability and severe autism, I am writing an essay about the experiences of autsitic children when going to routine health appointments such as vaccinations, blood tests (if health problems are suspected) dental checks and hearing and sight assessments.

I am here to ask if you could possibly breifly share experiences you have had both good and bad and any suggestions you can make to aid someone such as myself to make your appointment as easy and relaxed as possible, or if in these circumstances you would prefer that community nurses were to do all of this sort of thing in home/school.

 

thank you for your time.

  • thank you guys all experiences are appreciated. i know my essay wont change anything but you are helping me to write a better one and you will be changing the way i work and will be considering how i can make it easier for parents and children in your situation in the future.

  • I wouldn't class my daughter as being severe as she can communicate well on a one to one but we do have a serious problem with health care appointments.  She gets very panicky with routine appointments but is terrible with slightly more unusual ones.  We recently went to a dental appointment (not our regular dentist and my third attempt to get her there) to sign paperwork for having teeth removed by GA.  I didn't get to sign the paperwork because she was so distressed.  

    I told the dentist as soon as we went in about her anxiety/ASD diagnosis and because she thought my daughter was complying (got in the chair, had teeth counted etc) she ignored me, overtalked and then it was too late.  I now have to take her back to the orthodontist that referred her there because he wants to discuss doing nothing!  His practice is like something from the future and at her first appointment, he had 5 staff with him!!! That ended with him taking us to his office and dismissing 3 of them because he could see she was upset but dismissing them all would have been better.

    Someone coming to the house is always better.  She is still anxious but she feels more secure at home and settles quicker.  I know this isn't possible for things like the dentist doing work but why not for having a check up and signing paperwork?  Also, what would help, is visits to wherever we need to go before the real appointment.  If I could get my daughter to the hospital just to 'look', she might consent to having her teeth out eventually.

    Also, she sees an Orthotic doctor for a problem with her feet - she spends the first 10 minutes of that appointment in the toilets because her tummy gets upset!  Again, why can't they come to us?  He also doesn't understand the sensory issues she has so is usually a bit cross that she has been walking about in Ug boots rather than the clumpy boots that have been made for her.

    The one good appointment we had recently was the Optician.  Choosing the new glasses was a bit traumatic because she wanted ladies ones but with a small head, the ones she wanted weren't suitable.  The sales lady really took her time finding something similar that fitted well.

    Sorry, I could go on.  There is a lot of misunderstanding.  

  • When I took my autistic children (then undiagnosed) for their baby injections it was awful.

    My eldest child screamed as the nurse came towards her because she remembered the last one.  I had to get a member of staff to hold her as I knew she would think it was me causing her the awful pain.  The nurse said she had never seen a baby respond that way to an injection (the way she screamed, like a grown up) which was even before the injection.

    When my youngest had the same baby injections, the nurse scraped the needle along her skin before it went into the injection point and she really cried out, and a bruise came up around the injection site later on.

    When my youngest was 8 and I took her to a sight test she was very angry and aggressive in speaking to me, and the optician said "my, she's a little lady isn't she!"  At many other appointments for her sister's eye tests she melted down in the opticians through being stressed or overheated.  They probably dread us coming.

    We have suffered much misunderstanding from our GP due to lack of autism awareness too, meaning attribution of autistic traits to other causes.

    The thing that is desperately needed is autism awareness before anything else.